The Minister's Wooing

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  With a predominantly female cast of characters and a woman-centered point of view, Stowe’s novel can be read as a feminist text, especially in its focus on the transition from textual to experiential piety. Stowe associates experiential piety with women, and when Mary Scudder’s voice attains authority in the religious community, Stowe signals a shift to female power in the church. But because American Protestantism gave her few images for representing female religious power, she reached for Catholic imagery. Despite her Calvinist upbringing, Stowe had been attracted to Catholic art from her first trip to Italy, in 1854; also, Episcopalianism, which rejected the pope but kept much of the Catholic imagery and ritual, was a constant lure—her sister Catharine was to join the Episcopal church in the early 1860s, and Stowe herself attended Episcopal services in the latter part of her life. Catholic imagery pervades The Minister’s Wooing, especially in reference to Mary: the narrator first presents her to us as she is feeding a white dove and looking like “some old pictures of the girlhood of the Virgin” (14). Later in the novel the Virgin Mary is evoked again in the friendship of Mary and the French woman Virginie. These references are more than casual; they are facets of a female imaginary underlying the text, which leads, finally, to an intimation of a new era during which women’s voices would have parity with men’s. When, in the novel, Mary Scudder prays aloud in the women’s prayer meeting, speaking “of a love passing knowledge,—passing all love of lovers or of mothers” (212), she illustrates Stowe’s vision of a shift of spiritual authority from male to female modes. Miss Prissy reports Mary’s effect on her auditors: “ ‘that prayer seemed to take us all right up and put us down in heaven!’ ” (212). Not only does Stowe want to transfer authority from God the Father to Jesus the Son, she wants to ensure that women’s ways of knowing, loving, and praying become the prototype for a reborn American Protestantism.

  Like most of Stowe’s books, The Minister’s Wooing was an immediate success when it appeared in 1858 and 1859. It had been solicited for the then-new Atlantic Monthly by the editor, James Russell Lowell, in 1857, and it began serialization there in December of 1858. Stowe’s contemporaries voiced their appreciation even before the serialization was completed; Stowe’s English confidante Lady Byron, for instance, expressed “an intense interest in your new novel,” finding “more power in these few numbers than in any of your former writings.” Lowell, simultaneously acknowledging Stowe’s achievement and puffing his magazine, saw that the novel initiated a new phase in regionalist writing and publicly averred that “we do not believe there is any one who, by birth, breeding and national capacity, has had the opportunity to know New England so well as she, or who has the peculiar genius so to profit by the knowledge.” When The Minister’s Wooing was published in book form in 1859, both Charles Dickens and John Ruskin expressed their admiration, and George Eliot, then still merely Mary Ann Evans, wrote Stowe a letter that initiated a long friendship. Closer to home, the young Maine poet Celia Thaxter, recognizing a kindred spirit in Stowe’s depiction of the New England character, wrote to her friend E. C. Hoxie, “Isn’t ‘Minister’s Wooing’ killing good?”

  Twentieth-century critics have been less appreciative of Stowe’s work in general and of this novel specifically. With the exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, until recently neither The Minister’s Wooing nor the rest of Stowe’s canon received much critical attention, and what they did receive was grudgingly given. Even though many of the early critics defined American literature in terms of the Calvinist legacy, they rejected Stowe because she dealt with social and domestic issues and treated those issues humorously or sentimentally. Additionally, critics of the 1940s and 1950s—important periods in the formation of the American literary canon—contended that the criteria for greatness lay in verbal complexity and thematic abstruseness, and held that Stowe’s writings met neither of these criteria. Typical of this type of criticism is Alexander Cowie’s The Rise of the American Novel (1948), which first acknowledges the extraordinary influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the lasting power of The Minister’s Wooing but then accuses Stowe of having “very few of the attributes of a first-rate writer” beyond “an ability to release honest feeling” and claims that “doing good seemed more important to her than learning the craft of writing.” For Cowie, Stowe was “repetitious and literal,” with a “defective knowledge of sentence-structure and syntax” and a tin ear. Moreover, she had an unfortunate propensity for choosing ephemeral subjects: “The first of her two themes, slavery, was removed by history; the second, the New England heritage, was discounted as time went on.” Although Mr. Cowie may have been even more short-sighted than most of his contemporaries, he was typical in his dismissiveness; few critics prior to the 1980s read much of Stowe’s writing besides Uncle Tom’s Cabin, many chose to see even that as a work of maudlin sentimentality, and none was prepared to explore the nature of sentiment in Stowe’s work or to appreciate either her irony or her humor. Those few who read The Minister’s Wooing agreed with Fred Lewis Pattee that it was “a true study of the actuality of a period” but that as “local color” it lacked the national significance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For these critics “local color” was a code name for “female-authored-and-therefore-inferior,” a way to undermine the authority of works written from a woman’s point of view. When they classified The Minister’s Wooing as “local color,” then, they were in essence saying that it was minor because it was written by a woman.

  The tide began to shift in the 1980s, beginning with readers who wanted to reexamine the nation’s literary history and in the process rediscovered Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lawrence Buell (1978 and 1983) was one of the first of these scholars; subsequently such critics as Joan D. Hedrick (1988), Christopher D. Felker (1994), and John Gatta (1995) have continued the strain. At the same time, the new appreciation for nineteenth-century women’s literature in the 1980s brought positive attention to the particularly female aspects of the text. In New England Local Color Literature (1983) Josephine Donovan observed that the novel “concerns rejection of patriarchal systems that pervert and destroy women’s potential” (59); with this, scholars began to turn their attention from the story of Hopkins and the evolution of Calvinist rationalism into experiential piety to the story of how Mary, her mother, and the other women in the novel respond to the patriarchal nature of Calvinism. Interest in the minor characters accompanied this shift. For instance, Maura E. Shea (1996) discusses Miss Prissy as one of Stowe’s agents for uniting the sacred and the secular in human life, while Nancy Lusignan Schultz (1992) moves away from the religious theme entirely, examining Miss Prissy’s role in the fabric of the women’s community. In a similar vein, in my own work (1993) I have suggested that the imagery of interiority in the novel gives access to a particularly female consciousness that pervades it. Hedrick (1992) and Nicole Tonkovich (1995) move away from traditional literary critical questions entirely, instead focusing on questions of authorship, especially as these pertain to literature written by nineteenth-century women.

  It is to be hoped that these new approaches have laid a fresh foundation for twenty-first-century explorations of The Minister’s Wooing and other works by Harriet Beecher Stowe. With the expansion of our ability to read texts from many angles comes the possibility of perceiving new aspects of the cultural “work” this novel performs. Simultaneously historical novel and romantic comedy, The Minister’s Wooing provides a rich site for historical scholarship as well as a vehicle for theoretical investigation into power relationships marked by gender, class, and race distinctions. With that richness also comes pleasure: this novel is fun to read. Stowe’s humor—her rueful awareness of human foibles—makes The Minister’s Wooing a truly human comedy.

  My warm thanks to my colleagues Anne Carter Rose and Deborah Clarke for their incisive and thoughtful readings of this essay.

  SUSAN K. HARRIS

  State College, 1998

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  BIOGRAPHIES

 
; Fields, Annie, ed. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897.

  Foster, Charles H. The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954.

  Gerson, Noel B. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography. New York: Praeger, 1976.

  Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Johnston, Johanna. Runaway to Heaven: The Story of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963.

  Stowe, Charles Edward. Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled from Her Letters and Journals. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889.

  Wilson, Forrest. Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941.

  COLLECTIONS

  Ammons, Elizabeth, ed. Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

  Sundquist, Eric J., ed. New Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS IN COLLECTIONS

  Berkson, Dorothy. “Millennial Politics and the Feminine Fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” in Ammons, ed., Critical Essays, 1980: 244-57.

  Buell, Lawrence. “Calvinism Romanticized: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Hopkins, and The Minister’s Wooing,” Emerson Society Quarterly 24 (Third Quarter, 1978); reprinted in Ammons, ed., Critical Essays, 1980: 259-75.

  —. “Rival Romantic Interpretations of New England Puritanism: Hawthorne versus Stowe,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25.1 (1983): 77-99.

  Gatta, John. “Calvinism Feminized: Divine Matriarchy in Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 5.2-3 (1995): 147-66.

  Harris, Susan K. “The Female Imaginary in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,” New England Quarterly 66.2 (1993): 179-98.

  Hedrick, Joan D. “Parlor Literature: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Question of ‘Great Women Artists,’ ” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17.2 (1992): 275-303.

  —. “ ‘Peaceable Fruits’: The Ministry of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” American Quarterly 40.3 (1988): 307-32.

  Morey, Ann-Janine. “American Myth and Biblical Interpretation in the Fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55.4 (Winter 1987): 741-63.

  Schultz, Nancy Lusignan. “The Artist’s Craftiness: Miss Prissy in The Minister’s Wooing,” Studies in American Fiction 20.1 (1992): 33-44.

  Shea, Maura E. “Spinning Toward Salvation: The Ministry of Spinsters in Harriet Beecher Stowe,” American Transcendental Quarterly 10.4 (1996): 293-310.

  Tonkovich, Nicole. “Writing in Circles: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Semi-Colon Club, and the Construction of Women’s Authorship,” in Catherine Hobbs, ed. Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

  Wilson, Christopher P. “Tempests and Teapots: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,” New England Quarterly 58.4 (1985): 554-77.

  BOOKS

  Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

  Cowie, Alexander. The Rise of the American Novel. New York: American Book Company, 1948.

  Crumpacker, Laurie. Four Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Androgyny. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

  Donovan, Josephine. New England Local Color Literature. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.

  Eakin, Paul John. The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells and James. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976.

  Felker, Christopher D. Reinventing Cotton Mather in the American Renaissance: Magnalia Christi Americana in Hawthorne, Stowe, and Stoddard. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994.

  Fields, Annie, and Rose Lamb, eds. Letters of Celia Thaxter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895.

  Kimball, Gayle. The Religious Ideas of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Her Gospel of Womanhood. New York: Mellen Press, 1982.

  Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Feminine Fifties. Appleton-Century, 1940; reissued Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1966.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The Penguin Classics edition of The Minister’s Wooing is based on the Stowe-Day Foundation edition (Hartford, Conn., 1978), itself a reprint of the original edition, published by Derby and Jackson, New York, 1859.

  CHAPTER I

  Pre-Railroad Times

  MRS. KATY SCUDDER had invited Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, and Deacon Twitchel’s wife to take tea with her on the afternoon of June second, A.D. 17—.

  When one has a story to tell, one is always puzzled which end of it to begin at. You have a whole corps of people to introduce that you know and your reader doesn’t; and one thing so presupposes another, that, whichever way you turn your patchwork, the figures still seem ill-arranged. The small item which I have given will do as well as any other to begin with, as it certainly will lead you to ask, “Pray, who was Mrs. Katy Scudder?”—and this will start me systematically on my story.

  You must understand that in the then small seaport-town of Newport, at that time unconscious of its present fashion and fame, there lived nobody in those days who did not know “the Widow Scudder.”

  In New England settlements a custom has obtained, which is wholesome and touching, of ennobling the woman whom God has made desolate, by a sort of brevet rank which continually speaks for her as a claim on the respect and consideration of the community. The Widow Jones, or Brown, or Smith, is one of the fixed institutions of every New England village,—and doubtless the designation acts as a continual plea for one whom bereavement, like the lightning of heaven, has made sacred.

  The Widow Scudder, however, was one of the sort of women who reign queens in whatever society they move; nobody was more quoted, more deferred to, or enjoyed more unquestioned position than she. She was not rich,—a small farm, with a modest, “gambrel-roofed,” one-story cottage, was her sole domain; but she was one of the much-admired class who, in the speech of New England, are said to have “faculty,”—a gift which, among that shrewd people, commands more esteem than beauty, riches, learning, or any other worldly endowment. Faculty1 is Yankee for savoir faire,2 and the opposite virtue to shiftlessness. Faculty is the greatest virtue, and shiftlessness the greatest vice, of Yankee man and woman. To her who has faculty nothing shall be impossible. She shall scrub floors, wash, wring, bake, brew, and yet her hands shall be small and white; she shall have no perceptible income, yet always be handsomely dressed; she shall have not a servant in her house,—with a dairy to manage, hired men to feed, a boarder or two to care for, unheard-of pickling and preserving to do,—and yet you commonly see her every afternoon sitting at her shady parlor-window behind the lilacs, cool and easy, hemming muslin cap-strings, or reading the last new book. She who hath faculty is never in a hurry, never behindhand. She can always step over to distressed Mrs. Smith, whose jelly won’t come,—and stop to show Mrs. Jones how she makes her pickles so green,—and be ready to watch with poor old Mrs. Simpkins, who is down with the rheumatism.

  Of this genus was the Widow Scudder,—or, as the neighbors would have said of her, she that was Katy Stephens. Katy was the only daughter of a shipmaster, sailing from Newport harbor, who was wrecked off the coast one cold December night, and left small fortune to his widow and only child. Katy grew up, however, a tall, straight, black-eyed girl, with eyebrows drawn true as a bow, a foot arched like a Spanish woman’s, and a little hand which never saw the thing it could not do,—quick of speech, ready of wit, and, as such girls have a right to be, somewhat positive withal. Katy could harness a chaise, or row a boat; she could saddle and ride any horse in the neighborhood; she could cut any garment that ever was seen or thought of, make cake, jelly, and wine, from her earliest years, in most precocious style;—all without seeming to derange a sort of trim, well-kept air of ladyhood that sat jauntily on her.

  Of
course, being young and lively, she had her admirers, and some well-to-do in worldly affairs laid their lands and houses at Katy’s feet; but, to the wonder of all, she would not even pick them up to look at them. People shook their heads, and wondered whom Katy Stephens expected to get, and talked about going through the wood to pick up a crooked stick,—till one day she astonished her world by marrying a man that nobody ever thought of her taking.

  George Scudder was a grave, thoughtful young man,—not given to talking, and silent in the society of women, with that kind of reverential bashfulness which sometimes shows a pure, unworldly nature. How Katy came to fancy him everybody wondered,—for he never talked to her, never so much as picked up her glove when it fell, never asked her to ride or sail; in short, everybody said she must have wanted him from sheer wilfulness, because he of all the young men of the neighborhood never courted her. But Katy, having very sharp eyes, saw some things that nobody else saw. For example, you must know she discovered by mere accident that George Scudder always was looking at her, wherever she moved, though he looked away in a moment, if discovered,—and that an accidental touch of her hand or brush of her dress would send the blood into his cheek like the spirit in the tube of a thermometer; and so, as women are curious, you know, Katy amused herself with investigating the causes of these little phenomena, and, before she knew it, got her foot caught in a cobweb that held her fast, and constrained her, whether she would or no, to marry a poor man that nobody cared much for but herself.